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On one side is the largest, best-funded military service, eager to find any way to give an edge to its troops in combat but stymied by the infamous inertia of its acquisitions bureaucracy. On the other is the former Marine, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who’s worn the boots of grunts — and is out to make a name for himself on the committee that his father once chaired.

The fight broke into the open last week in a tense back-and-forth between the Army’s hard-charging chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, and Hunter, who has charged the Army with making it difficult for soldiers in Afghanistan to get their hands on what Hunter considers lifesaving technology.

The two sides are now plotting their next moves.

Hunter is crafting legislation to allow Congress to re-evaluate and possibly cut funding for individual parts of the Army’s sprawling Distributed Common Ground System, an intelligence-gathering network that’s either a massive blunder or a major technological achievement depending on which side’s talking. The system is designed to help commanders piece together intelligence gathered from the Army’s mosaic of sources and give them real-world help, such as predicting where attacks might take place.

The Army is waging a charm offensive to garner support for the program among members of Congress — and to correct what it considers a wave of misinformation in the news media.

“Somehow we are not getting the message out fully,” said Heidi Shyu, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology. “What DCGS buys us is this common picture of the battlefield pulling from all the intelligence sources.”

In an interview in her Pentagon office, Shyu described Odierno’s tense exchange with Hunter as the result of a “bubbling up” of “frustration” over Hunter’s accusations. For more than a year, Hunter has been pressing the issue, casting certain elements of DCGS as a waste of money and charging the Army with making it difficult for troops to acquire off-the-shelf technology that could be used to plug holes in the system.

Hunter says he has been bombarded with emails backing him up. “Much of the promised functionality of DCGS-A remains limited, broken, unstable and utterly ineffective,” one soldier said earlier this month in a message to Hunter’s office, which shared a number of emails with POLITICO on the condition that soldiers not be named.

Another wrote, “The problem is anyone who talks about DCGS-A in a negative light ends their career.”

Shyu responded that her office welcomes honest input about the system and that she traveled to Afghanistan in January to hear from soldiers about their experiences with it. She acknowledged DCGS has shortfalls but said the Army is working to improve the network, especially its cumbersome user interface.

She lamented what she called misconceptions that have led to reports in the news media that it could be replaced at lower cost by an off-the-shelf product made by the California-based software company Palantir Technologies. Shyu praised Palantir’s easy-to-use software, which analyzes intelligence on the battlefield, but she said it relies on data collected by DCGS. She compared Palantir to an application and DCGS to an iPhone.

“We’re not fighting Palantir — in fact, quite the opposite,” she said, explaining that the Army entered into a cooperative research agreement with the company in May 2012 in an effort to explore options for integrating the technology into DCGS.